Morbid Curiosities

Why everyone loves a good train wreck.

by Eric G. Wilson, Ph.D.

The Year in Scandal

Why do we love lists of the year's best scandals? Read More

Why We Love Dead Things

Romance at its height worships the crypt. Sex is best with one foot in the grave. Halloween is the true Valentine's Day. We've all gone Goth. Read More

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try a Little Bit, then Quit

Winning isn't everything. It's the worst thing. Read More

Anatomy of a Scandal

How do we make sense of unspeakable scandals? Read More

The Moral of the Morbid

When is morbid curiosity moral? Read More

Eric G. Wilson, Ph.D., is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of the forthcoming Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away and Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

more...

About Morbid Curiosities

Morbid curiosity, morose delectation, schadenfreude. As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our dark side; we succumb to them at our own peril. And yet we are compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there’s no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In "Morbid Curiosities," I set out to discover the source of our attraction to the macabre, and to wonder if there's something nourishing in the darkness.